Radical Research Ideas for Early Career Scientists

Only approved Norwegian research organisations may apply. See here for the list of approved Norwegian research organisations. 

Requirements relating to the Project Owner  

The research organisation listed as the Project Owner in the application form must have approved the submission of the application.  

Requirements relating to the project manager  

• Experience: You must have an approved doctorate or been approved with associate professor competence, and the period between the date of defence of your doctoral dissertation and the day you submit your application must be between two and seven years. If more than seven years have passed since you defended your dissertation, you may apply to subtract statutory leaves of absence, compulsory military or civilian service, seeking asylum or sick leave in accordance with our rules for subtracting time.   

• Ongoing project: You may submit an application for Radical Research Ideas even if you have an ongoing FRIPRO/ground-breaking research project. 
• Employment requirements: You must be employed in at least 20 per cent of a full-time position at the Project Owner (research organisation) for the entire duration of the project period. You can be employed in a position as researcher or another academic position. You may, but do not have to, be employed by the Project Owner when you submit your grant application  

Waiting period and submission restriction period  

As a project manager for an application to one of the five calls for ground-breaking research, you will have a one-year waiting period calculated from the date you submitted the application until you can be the project manager for a new such application.  

For three of the five calls, the project manager will also be subject to a submission restriction period of 1-2-year if the application receives scores below certain thresholds in the panel review. Applications for Radical Research Ideas in Early Career do not result in a submission restriction period for the project manager, regardless of marks, but if you have a submission restriction period after applying to one of the other calls, you cannot be the project manager for an application for Radical Research Ideas.  

In the table below, you can see which average marks give the different waiting and submission restriction periods. (Scale of marks 1–7, where 7 is the highest mark. For Radical Research Ideas, the scale of marks is A-C, where A is the highest mark.)   

You cannot be the project manager for a new application to one of these five calls if you have a waiting period or submission restriction period, but you can be a project participant in others' FRIPRO applications and a project manager for applications for other calls from the Research Council, regardless of the waiting period and submission restriction period. The waiting period and submission restriction period apply across all open-ended calls for Researcher Projects within ground-breaking research, unless otherwise described in the call.  

The waiting period also means that you can only be the project manager for one application at a time. You must therefore choose which of the five calls you want to apply for. Check the requirements for the project manager and purpose for each call to see which one is right for you and your project.  

Requirements relating to partners  

Only approved research organisations (see "Who is eligible to apply?" above) or equivalent research organisations in other countries are eligible to be partners and receive funding under this call. Other types of organisations, such as companies and other undertakings, may not be project partners in Researcher Projects. Read more about partners.  

The Project Owner and/or partners can engage subcontractors to provide services and contribute to the implementation of certain tasks in the project. Subcontractors may not be granted rights to project results. Organisations that are subject to the regulations for public procurement must in the normal manner carry out the selection of subcontractors in accordance with these regulations. It is not possible to have R&D suppliers in the project.    

A project partner may not have two different roles in the project. This means that a subcontractor may not serve as Project Owner or partner in the project at the same time.  

You can apply for funding to cover actual costs necessary to carry out the project. The Project Owner must obtain information about costs from the project partners. These costs are to be entered in the cost plan under the relevant cost category.  

Support may be granted to cover the following costs:  

• Payroll and indirect expenses. Costs related to researcher time (including the position of the project manager) at the research organisations participating in the project. 
• Equipment. This includes operating and depreciation costs for scientific equipment and research infrastructure necessary to carry out the project.  
• Operating expenses. Costs for other activities that are necessary to carry out the project's R&D activities. Purchase from subcontractors over NOK 100 000 must be specified.   

You will find detailed and important information about what to enter in the project budget on our website on what to enter in the project budget. 

Scope of funding  

We can award funding of NOK 0.5-2 million per project under this call. We do not require own financing. However, if our lump sum rates do not cover all costs for positions in the university and university college sector, the difference must be covered through own financing. For research positions in the institute sector, the institute's reported hourly rates must be used. 

Ethics  

The Research Council requires a high standard of research ethics in the projects we fund, and ethics is included in the assessment criterion for Research Quality. In the template for the project description, there is a separate section that deals with this. The description of ethics is first and foremost an assurance to the peers that there is a plan in place to deal with the most important ethical dilemmas in the project. If you need to describe this in more detail, this can be done elsewhere in the project description, for example under method selection, or you can do so in the data management plan(s) (see below).  

The responsibility for ensuring that the research ethics standard is followed lies with the individual researcher and research institution (cf. the Act on the Organisation of Research Ethics Work). The panel's assessment and the Research Council's decision on funding do not entail any research ethics approval.  

Conditions for funding  

We do not award state aid under this call. This means that the funding can only go to the research organisation's non-economic activity. We assume that the necessary accounting separation is in place. Our conditions for awarding and disbursing support for the first year, and any commitments and payments for subsequent years, can be found in our general terms and conditions for R&D projects on the information page What the contract involves.    

In addition, you must be aware of the following if you should receive an award from us:  

• The project manager and the Project Owner must have assessed and managed any issue of research security in the project. Research security refers to the risks related to undesirable transfer of knowledge and technology, malign influence on research and innovation or violations of research ethics or integrity, where knowledge and technology are used to undermine key societal values.  
• Grant recipients in research organisations and the public sector (Project Owners and partners) have  action plans for gender equality (GEPs) available on their websites. This must be in place before the contract is signed for projects with grants from us. The requirement does not apply to the private sector, interest groups or the voluntary sector.   
• The Research Council requires full and immediate open access for scientific articles, see Plan S - open access to publications.   
• For all projects that handle data, the Project Owner must prepare a data management plan in connection with the revised application, where you will find more information about the requirements for data management plans in projects that receive funding from us.   
• For medical and health studies involving humans, the Research Council sets special requirements and guidelines for prospective registration of studies and publication of results. 

The application must be created and submitted via My RCN Web. This call for proposals is open-ended, which means that you can create and submit an application at any time. You can edit and save a created application until you submit it. It is the application that is submitted that is processed. You cannot change the application after you have submitted it. 

If you wish to make any changes to an application after you’ve submitted it, you must withdraw it. You can do so by sending us an e-mail to fripro@rcn.no with a copy to the administrative officer of the application stating the ES number of the application. Applications withdrawn within one month of submission do not result in a waiting period. You may then create a new application as a copy of the old one, make any necessary changes, and submit it again.  

The application must meet the following requirements:  

• The application and all attachments must be written in English.  
• Mandatory attachments must be included.  
• The attachments must be in PDF format.  
• Requirements relating to the project manager, the Project Owner, the research organisation and partners must be met.  
• The project must have a planned start date between 8 and 18 months after submission of the application.   

If the application does not meet the requirements in the list above, we will ask you to withdraw the application and possibly resubmit it where the deficiencies have been corrected. If the application is not withdrawn, it may be rejected. Project managers of rejected applications receive a one year waiting period. 

Mandatory attachments  

The mandatory attachments must be written in templates that can be found at the end of the call.  

• project description, maximum 8 pages  
• CV of the project manager, maximum four pages  
• Documentation for subtracting time if you apply for a deduction for experience. (We don't have a template for this. The document must be uploaded under Attachments/Other items in the application form.)  

Optional attachments  

• Attach CVs for the most important project participants (if there are any) 
  • Each CV must be a maximum of 4 pages 
  • It is mandatory to use the CV template at the bottom of the call.  
  • Upload each CV as a separate attachment and select the attachment category "Curriculum vitae (CV)".  
  • You will assess which project participants are the most important, and in which cases it will be of importance in the application processing to assess the project participants' qualifications.  
• If you wish, you can attach a brief description of competence or suggestions for up to three peers you believe would be suitable to assess your application. Reviewers must have their workplace outside of Norway and must have considerable experience within research. We are not obliged to use the suggestions, but can do so if necessary.  

All attachments to the application must be submitted with the application.   

Attachments other than those mentioned here as mandatory and optional, as well as any websites that you link to in the application, will not be included in the assessment of the application.  

Be careful to upload the correct attachment type, as there are no technical restrictions on what kind of templates it is possible to upload in the application form. 

The peer reviewers assess applications on the basis of the following criterion (forthcoming):

Each application will be evaluated by three peer reviewers according to the evaluation criterion. The three reviewers do not discuss the application among themselves to reach a consensus, but give their own written evaluation and assign a mark on an A-B-C scale, defined as follows: 

• A – Excellent: The research idea is exciting, particularly ambitious and unique, and challenges the state-of-the-art. The project is necessary and will result in answers to project objectives. The research setup and project group are adequate and appropriate 
• B – Good: The research idea is ambitious and unique and challenges the state-of-the-art. The project is necessary and will result in answers to project objectives. The research setup and project group are adequate and appropriate  
• C – Weak: The project does not adequately fulfill the criterion. The answer to one or more questions in the criterion, is “no”. 

You can find information about how we find peer reviewers and what information they receive on the FRIPRO information page. 

The combination of the marks from the three reviewers determines whether the application is eligible for funding or not and how it is ranked. We always disregard the weakest of the three marks (shown as “Reviewer 3” in the table below). To be eligible for funding, the application may have up to one C and at least one A. The two best marks must therefore be either A-A or A-B. The combination A-A results in the highest rank 1, whereas the combination A-B results in rank 2. All other combinations are non-qualified. 

The table below shows the different grade combinations, which qualify for funding and which do not, and the ranking of the qualified ones. 

After the peer review, the portfolio board for groundbreaking research makes a decision on funding or rejection, according to established allocation principles, which are scheduled to be available on the FRIPRO information page in June. The portfolio board processes applications approximately every other month. The first allocation is planned for November or December 2025.  

Applications that are not eligible for funding will be rejected. Applications that qualify for funding are included in the competition for funding in three decision rounds. This also applies across calendar years. If your application qualifies, but is not granted in the first decision round, it will be given a second chance in the next decision round. If it is not granted then either, it will be included in a third and final round. Applications that are included in their second or third round will compete on an equal footing with applications that compete in their first round.  

The application processing time for each application will vary, depending on factors such as the number of applications received within the same subject area, the availability of peer reviewers and coincidences. The average application processing time is estimated to be 4 months for applications that receive a response in the first round of decisions in which they are processed, with variations of 2-8 months. If your application is included in several rounds, it will take 2-4 months longer before you receive an answer to your application compared to an application that is either rejected or that is awarded funding in its first round of decision. 

We will announce which applications were awarded funding about every two months. Applicants will also receive a letter on My RCN Web.